Ruby: ComparingGuiToolkits/TakeTwo

In May 2004 there was a thread on RubyTalk about GUI toolkits. The following posts are worth saving for this Wiki topic. See ComparingGuiToolkits for more.

In RubyTalk:100395 BillAtkins? wrote:

As anyone can tell by looking at the topics of my recent posts, I'm
having trouble picking a Ruby GUI to use for a project.  Here are some
of the toolkits I'm considering and the pros and cons of each.  My
project, by the way, is a simple open-source, instant messaging client
that would have to work on Windows and NIX systems.

1. Tk
pros: comes with Ruby; pretty much everywhere; powerful TkText widget
cons: messy, mostly undocumented API; unconventional appearance;
requires tcl; no tree control; it's Tk :)

2. FOX
pros: consistent and attractive appearance; very OO
cons: no substitute for TkText - FXScintilla might do the trick, but
it's API is a lot more complicated than TkText; somewhat C++-ish API;
FxTreeList doesn't allow setting styles for individual items

3. Qt
pros: supposed to be really nice
cons: costs money on Win32 - out of the question

4. Gtk
pros: plenty of widgets; antialiasing
cons: supposed to be unstable on Win32; requires large download on
Win32 machines; X-ish interface

5. Wx
pros: well-designed Rubyish API; supports changing tree item styles;
seems pretty stable for a young project; native widgets
cons: brand new - could have problems; on Linux, requires a large
download (wxGTK) in order to work (6MB)

Wx would be my choice except that it requires such a large download on
Linux.  I would really prefer that the user download as little as
possible, aside from Ruby itself.  Considering that my project's
source will be under 300K, it seems silly to require large GUI
downloads just to make it work.

Also, antialiased fonts would be extremely nice, but no toolkit seems
to support them, except Gtk (right?) which I can't use because of the
large Win32 dependencies.

Any thoughts on these?

Bill

Anonymous followed up with:

2. FOX Toolkit.  One thing to watch out for with FOX is the licensing terms.  If 
your project is GPL or LGPL already, then this is a non-issue. If your application
links to it statically, you need to open source (LGPL) the entire application.
If your application links to it dynamically, then well, read the LGPL (especially
section 6 about giving others permission to modify your app). If you don't like 
these terms, try FLTK or wxWidgets which have permissive exceptions to the 
LGPL for statically linked applications that simply use the library.  

5. wx (wxWidgets, wxRuby).  I just tried wxWidgets 2.6.0 on Windows 2000. I used 
a program called DialogBlocks 1.94 (a GUI designer) to compile the example project
to .exe.  I chose the free MS VC++ Toolkit 2003 as the compiler.

When I ran depends.exe on it to view the .dll list, it didn't include Gtk.  All I 
saw listed were standard Windows libraries such as kernel32.dll, user32.dll, 
gdi32.dll, etc...  No sign of Gtk-related libraries at all.

I'm going to try wxRuby 0.6 next.  So far, I've gone from FOX Toolkit -> FLTK -> ?
with c++ and ruby.  Looks like wxWidgets 2.6.0 is the next (and hopefully) last one 
I try.  

FLTK was/is nice but it probably won't have up-to-date ruby bindings in 1.1/1.2
branches due to lack of unicode or utf8 support.  When FLTK 2.0 is released, I'm 
sure ruby support will improve since our friends in Japan will find it more useful 
than 1.x.

The above post by "Anonymous" was not in fact part of the original ruby-talk discussion thread back in May 2004. This is part of an unforunate attempt to spread FUD about FOX licensing terms. For the authoritative word on what FOX's license has to say about applications that are statically or dynamically linked to the FOX library, please see [this page] at the FOX Web site. -- LyleJohnson

PhilTomson followed up with:

FLTK?  The FLTK shared lib and ruby bindings are smaller than 1MB.

Problem is that it's still not released 'into the wild' (at least the 
source code for the bindings, that is).  On Monday I'll try to remember to 
see if there has been any progress on that front.

JoaoPedrosa? followed up (the original) with:

> 4. Gtk
> pros: plenty of widgets; antialiasing
> cons: supposed to be unstable on Win32; requires
> large download on
> Win32 machines; X-ish interface

"supposed to be unstable on Win32"

Maybe. But I used to run my own Ruby-GNOME2 IRC client
on Windows just fine. Once in a while you may find a
bug (not really related to Windows), but if it's
reproducible, it's fixable :)

"requires large download on Win32 machines"

That's the major drawback. I haven't tested something
to shrink the package size yet.

"X-ish interface"

The Wimp engine does a good job at making your app
have a native appearance.

On the pro side:

You can compile the latest version of Ruby-GTK+2 from
the CVS on Windows by following the tutorial at
HTTP://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/hiki.cgi?compile_mingw.
This way you can keep up with fixed bugs if you want.

The project Ruby-GNOME2 has a more fine-grained
control over its source-code, because it does not use
SWIG.

IMHO, it seems inevitable the progress of GTK+ on
Windows.

AraHoward followed up (the original) with:

6. webrick + native browser
  you're program spawns a webserver (fork or popen) and then spanws a browser
  pointing at it.  the webrick server IS the ui.

  pros: works on *nix, windoze, mac.  familiar ui.  extremely quick to code.
  cons: limiting ui (but what do you really need for an im client?)


just something to consider - i had managed to make this work in 30 lines of
code or so a while back - now i can't seem to find it, but it's pretty
straightword:

  url = start_server

  require 'rbconfig'
  case platform
    when /*nix/
      start_nix_client url
    when /windoze/
      start_windoze_client url
    when /mac/
      start_mac_client url
  end

See his full code at TheCrossPlatFormHTMLGUIScript

Vlad had this to say:

Are you trying the recently released RubyWebDialogs (graphical User
Interface for Ruby Applications) ?

HTTP://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubywebdialogs/

That RubyWebDialogs certainly looks like an interesting project.

DavidRoss? followed up (the original) with:

7. WideStudio
 - APIs are same in every langauge it supports
 - Supports C/C++, Ruby, Perl, and Python
 - wsbuilder makes easy tool for RAD
 - good documentation of the API

Homepage: HTTP://www.widestudio.org

Anonymous suggests adding ruby support for newer toolkits:

N1. Ultimate++:

PROS:
 - New C++ GUI toolkit
 - Aims to enable more productivity than all existing toolkits
 - Very nice GUI Designer and debugger works in both Windows and Linux
 - BSD license! No fear of auto-granting patents & reverse-engineering 
   rights to users if this is used in commercial products (unlike GPL and LGPL)
 - Actively being developed.  Last release April 2005.

CONS:
 - Current version is 0.98.5 (Released April 11, 2005) pre-1.0 scares people away
 - Smaller userbase since it is newer than others but growing (so is ruby)
 - Needs ruby bindings asap!
 - Documentation is hard-to-find because it only exists with their IDE as a
   custom tool!  They really need to provide that info in webpages online...

Homepage: upp.sourceforge.net/index.html

ComparingGuiToolkits/TakeTwo (Ruby)